Plane crash survivor plans to play in 2013

May 01, 2012|The Sports Xchange

Austin Hatch, the Michigan high-school student who survived two plane crashes, but lost his entire family, intends to fulfill his dream of playing college basketball.

On June 24, a plane piloted by his father, which left Ft. Wayne, Ind., with Austin, his stepmother and two family dogs aboard, crashed while attempting to land at an airport near their Lake Michigan summer home.

His father, Stephen, and stepmother, Kimberly Hatch, died, along with one of the dogs. Austin, then 16, suffered a severe brain injury, a punctured lung and rib injuries. This crash happened eight years after the first crash, which killed his biological mother and two siblings.

At the time of the second crash, Hatch had just committed to play at the University of Michigan for the Class of 2013.

He plans to fulfill that commitment, though doctors haven't yet cleared him to play.

"I'm still going on a full basketball scholarship," he said. "I'll still be on the team and all of that and go to practice and everything. But I just don't know if I'll be quite as good as I was before. But I still have over a year until then, so a lot can happen."

Basketball aside, Hatch's main difficulty has been his slow recovery from the brain injury, and dealing with the loss of his family.

"The most difficult thing is just missing my biological family, because I'm the only one left," he told the Detroit Free Press. "I wish there was an instructional manual in how to deal with this kind of loss."